Those of you who have been reading Irreal for a while know that I’m a huge fan of Emacs Calc. It’s tremendously flexible and comprehensive and it’s built into Emacs. But that comprehensiveness comes at a price: it’s very hard to learn its commands and they always prove evanescent if you don’t use them regularly. I’ve been through the manual a couple times and I still can’t remember how to use most of Calc. I almost always bring up the cheat sheet when I need to do anything more than the basic calculator functions.
Charles Choi to the rescue. We haven’t heard from Choi for a while and now we know why. He’s been busy building a porcelain for Emacs Calc. It’s a transient menu that helps you remember many of the esoteric Calc commands. When you get stuck, you can bring up the menu and navigate your way to the proper command.
Choi says that he’s not trying to provide full coverage of the Calc commands, just the most—for some value of “most”—used commands. You can read about his goals and non-goals at his post.
The package is on MELPA and although Choi doesn’t give the use-package recipe for installing it, here’s what I used:
(use-package casual :ensure t :bind (:map calc-mode-map ("C-o" . 'casual-main-menu)))
I just installed it so I don’t have a lot of experience with it yet but so far I really like it. The menu doesn’t appear until you invoke it and it disappears after you choose a command so it doesn’t get in the way. I can see this package making Calc more approachable and increasing its usage. If you’re a Calc user or would like to be, you definitely want to take a look at Choi’s post.